


hic sunt leones

by windingwoods



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Cybernetic Elements, Multi, Quadrant talk, Temporary Character Death, classpect powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-15 03:23:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14150883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windingwoods/pseuds/windingwoods
Summary: It’s on a November day that Her Imperial Condescension releases the Lord English virus, causing a mass system failure among the carapacian androids of her own production and plunging the world into chaos. Four hundred thirteen years later, Rose Lalonde goes missing.





	1. prologue: cartwheels in your honor

**Roxy: Face the lesser of two evils.**

 

The void is a familiar, velvety texture wrapped tight around her like a second skin. It stretches with every step, following the erratic pace of her feet without a single wrinkle as she makes her way down the unlit alleyway. She’s pretty sure she’s leaving a trail of blood smudges all over the place but— but. First of all, the place’s nearly deserted and has been for as long as Roxy can remember: no one ‘cept for some especially slippery lone wolves would ever want to live this far out in the outskirts of the Medium, away from the already scarce comforts the safe zones can provide. Second, some blood is not going to matter if she’s managed to lose her tail just as effectively as she thinks she has.

There hasn’t been any noise behind her for the last twenty minutes or so; Dave would be able to pin it down to the decimals easy peasy, but for now all that matters to her is that the carapacians seem to have stopped following her since she’s managed to haul her ass back on LOTAK ground. Dirk’s tech seems to be working its magic as smoothly as usual, even after the Lil Hal, ah, _accident_.

Still, the situation calls for a quick evaluation.

The void camo is still holding up fine but she should drop it, lest she scare the shit out of Dirk bypassing all his precious sensors and materializing at his door out of thin air. The gash in her side doesn’t hurt, which, coupled with the way she doesn't seem to be able to stabilize her breath, means she’s still riding that sweet adrenaline shock, although likely not for long. And last but not least, she can see Dirk’s place.

“Home sweet home,” she rasps as she lets go of her cover. Around her every single hidden piece of (thoroughly tinkered with) Skaianet tech responds to her presence, redirecting a signal to the main cyberbrain residing only a few more steps away. The lights are off but Roxy can still make out some semblance of what she thinks might be movement if she squints hard enough. She’s banking this all on the intimate knowledge that no Dirk Strider she knows would ever be asleep at 3am and that should be somewhat disconcerting, but she’s lost enough blood to be way past that and straight into Death Approaches brand optimism.

Plus, the alternative is far too awkward for Roxy to pick the responsible option, whatever that’s supposed to mean, so she soldiers on to Dirk’s door with a grimace.

She starts knocking a sequence in morse code, something to reassure Dirk it’s her but most of all to get a rise out of him if she is to be perfectly honest, and, true to himself, Di-Stri pokes his face out of the door a few moments later, wearing his patented just-chewed-on-a-lemon expression that Roxy loves so much.

“Would you stop tapping the words _horse dildo_ on my door alr—” It’s usually hard to get a read on him, which is what makes watching as he takes in the state Roxy’s in kind of surreal. There’s a panicked look in his eyes that doesn’t get to last one full second before it gets squashed by the cold, impassive stare Dirk always dons when he’s fighting, or talking about Jake.

 _Wait_ , Roxy’s brain goes, not quite making it to the spoken speech stage before Dirk’s foot slams into her shin with a hard smack, disrupting her balance. Her face collides with the door frame and this time there’s pain, good ol’ pain, shooting up her arms in pinpricks as the iron grip of Dirk’s dominant hand clenches around both her wrists while his other hurriedly tugs the collar of her jacket down to palm the artificial patch of skin on her neck.

“‘m clean,” she manages to slur through the ringing in her ears and the sudden, intense awareness of the still bleeding wound in her side. That seems to be the magic spell that gets Dirk to hop down overdrive train, at least for a short while knowing him; the grip on her wrists loosens into him intertwining his fingers with hers, thumb brushing ever so carefully over the thrumming of her veins in an unspoken apology, and his other arm snakes around her waist as he lets his forehead drop against her nape with a warm huff of breath. It tickles, but it’s cozy.

“Christ, Rox, sorry,” Dirk’s mumbling into the juncture between the latex-covered metal and her actual skin. “Sorry, you scared me, you’re _bleeding_.”

It’s like it hits him all at once again now that he’s made sure she’s not going to go rogue (hah, the blood loss is getting at her sense of humor it seems) on him in the middle of nowhere, too far away from Callie or any Skaianet post for comfort, and both his hands on her are suddenly hurrying her inside as he positively rambles. Roxy’s tuning out most of it, half on purpose, but she does hear Dirk’s exasperated voice say, “I can’t believe you came here instead of, you know, going to an actual doctor, for fuck’s sake, LOCAH’s right fucking _there_ , this is the most irresponsible—” More white noise and pain and a too-vivid memory of Rose cracking a big, toothy grin after telling a bad joke. “All ‘cause you don’t wanna see your god damned ex.”

 _That’s fuckin’ rich_ , her brain chimes in again, right before blacking out.

 


	2. my own secret ceremonials

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me? updating on a regular schedule? more likely than you think!

**Jane: Try to honor the Hippocratic Oath.**  

There’s a soothing quality to the silence inside of Dirk’s cabin, Jane muses. The low humming and whirring of all of the technology crammed inside of what is supposed to serve as his bedroom are the only sounds: both Roxy and Dirk sleep a tad bit too quietly for their snoring to classify as anything more than imperceptible and wild animals seldom linger this close to carapacian ground. That, admittedly, makes Jane miss the hummingbirds of LOFAF a little bit.

She ought to pay Jade a visit, but she’s got a feeling they’re to meet soon anyway if her idea about what in the blazes has gotten Roxy bleeding out on her stepbrother’s porch with claw marks deep into her side proves itself to be correct. _At least it’s not trident cuts this time_ , her own brain spits at her, nipping, and she’s got no comeback for that.

A soft, pained noise breaks the quiet and Roxy’s eyes flutter open as Jane yanks herself off memory lane, or puts a honest effort into it. It’s a mixed success, which means guilt still tears through her guts with white-hot nausea when their gazes meet and Roxy has the nerve to _smile_.

“Y’re so pretty,” she slurs, voice thick with a heaviness that doesn’t stem from sleep alone. “Even when y’re mad ‘t me.” Then her surely sluggish mind seems to catch up with what her mouth has just spewed and Jane watches with an ill-advised mixture of fascination and endearment as Roxy’s face twists with as much mortification as someone who’s lost entirely too much blood in the last few hours can muster.

“That… was Asleep Me. Don’t listen to her, she’s no good. Also maybe high on morphine? What’d ya even _give_ me, Doc?”

The attempt at more comprehensible speech isn’t lost on Jane, nor is the stifled, low groan that slips through Roxy’s gritted teeth as she makes the bad decision of trying to rise to a sitting position. “Oof. No morphine, huh.”

Jane shakes her head with a sympathetic grimace. “Nope, just some plain Maid of Life ministrations to stabilize you and clean the wound, I’m afraid. We’re… kind of low on meds right now and I’d rather— God, this is so wrong. Uh. Just forget I said that? Please?”

“You’d rather use what little you have on worse cases than implanted, superhuman ol’ me,” Roxy finishes for her. There’s not an ounce of resentment in her words, even though she’s entitled to it, even though Jane had to fight off the panic with Dirk’s hand clenched in her own the night before to even just make herself _touch_ her. Her god damned patient.

Some of her inner struggling must be showing on the outside because Roxy’s making a face now, one that screams how much she thinks she’s fucked up, and Jane has to suppress the urge to yell at her to stop being so bloody considerate. Instead, she lets her talk, because Karkat’s told her communication is the key to a healthy lifestyle and _he_ doesn’t seem to be having any trouble dating his Strilonde, unlike herself.

“‘s no big deal, Janey,” Roxy murmurs. “I mean it. Also, at the end of the day I’m not the one who needs meds the most here.”

She’s looking towards Dirk’s sleeping figure slumped on a chair as she says it (the fact that their voices haven’t woken him up yet, given how light his sleep tends to be, is a cruel reminder of how tired he must feel right now) and Jane’s stomach sinks to her feet because it’s true. It’s true, Dirk hasn’t seen antidepressants in ages: Roxy says materializing meds from the void is “a bitch” and there’s nothing Jane can do about it but rush to his side at the drop of a hat. To whoever asks why is she, a doctor, residing so close to the harsh terrain of LOTAK she answers with a glare cold enough to make them think again.

“But we’re gonna fix it,” says Roxy next, with a certainty that makes Jane worry she might be going delirious because of a fever for a moment, before her powers kindly informing her that nope, nothing in Roxy’s vitals suggests that particular scenario just yet. “Why’d you think I was out in the wasteland all on my lonesome yesterday night?”

“I don’t know, because you’re an unnerving fool with a death wish?”

“Can concede to that. The juicy, juicy truth, though, is that—” Roxy rummages through the pockets of her pants, then holds out something that looks like an USB flash drive with a croaked whooping sound of triumph. “This baby here holds the map to the outskirts of the Furthest Ring, as well as the confirmation that we’ve been looking for all along. About L.E. being in there, all holed up like a tunnelbeast.”

That’s Jane’s cue to say something, maybe even simply suck in a gasping, shocked breath for the hell of it and bring a trembling hand to her chest, even though this is exactly the same conclusion she had already come to by doing the math, but she doesn’t think she can do any of that. She stays still, stunned into a statue, and tries to understand.

“I think, no, I know this is the same shit Rose stole from those fuckers, and this is where she’s gone.” Roxy’s voice hardens. Jane hates how her own body attunes itself to it without hesitation. She’d follow Roxy to hell and back, the Furthest Ring is nothing.

“We’re goin’ after her dumb ass and we’re gettin’ it all back.”

 

**Karkat: Be a terrible host, see if you care.**

It’s barely past noon and Karkat thinks there’s a grand total of nine people too many at his and Dave’s place. He’s never liked the location of LOHAC much, it’s always felt like the way it’s wedged right in between the outer territories and the center ones was meant to be a cruel allegory of Dave’s own visceral need for a quiet life pulled apart by his sense of duty hanging above his head like his personal sword of Damocles, but now that it’s been designated as optimal Group Hangout because, quoting Jade Harley, it’s “the easiest to reach for all of us, get the stick out your ass already” his dislike has long shed its husk and grown into beautiful, gaudy hatred. Man, fuck this.

“ _Fuck_ this,” he repeats out loud when he hears the unmistakable crash of glass shattering on the floor from the kitchen, followed swiftly by a muffled expletive that, he thinks, might have been uttered by one fucking John Egbert. At least his anguish seems to get a chuckle out of Dave, shallow and muffled by the wool of Karkat’s black turtleneck, which Dave seems to have picked as his hiding spot together with the whole of Karkat’s lap, really.

“You gonna stop roleplaying one of Feferi’s hellmurder seabeasts with the nasty tentacles on me so I can stand and direct our guests to park their asses here in the living room like civilized people already?”

“You know you could, like, say ‘octopus’ and use a ton less weird troll words, right?” Dave counters, and Karkat has to resist the urge to roll his eyes, even though no one’s there to see anyway and Dave certainly isn’t facing him at the moment.

It’s not like he expects him to actually cooperate, nor does he really want to get up and be sociable about this whole messed up affair that’s taking place under his roof like a bomb ready to go off, but he can’t be blamed for trying to check on his boyfriend’s precarious mental state either. It doesn’t seem like Dave has any intention of giving him a straight answer, so Karkat does what Jade’s told him to do in these situations: he starts petting his hair with a low, definitely a bit too moirail-feely hum. Not that the useless human specimen he happens to be dating has ever bothered much with quadrants anyway.

“I wanna maybe kiss your shouty mouth,” he had told Karkat when they’d first tried to put some order in their troll-human mess, “if that’s alright with you.” Newsflash for literally no one, it had been more than alright with him.

Now, years later, Dave slumps further against his chest and doesn’t say anything for a while. It’s the kind of loaded silence that stretches on like storm clouds hovering above the horizon of Karkat’s life and general low tolerance for almost anything, which means he forces himself to be very quiet and just keep stroking Dave’s hair until he can feel the coil inside of him snap.

“I just…” Dave starts, voice much more tired than Karkat’d like. “God, okay, we’re doing this. We’re making this happen.”

“You declared SBAHJ jokes _passé_ when you hit seventeen years of age, David. We had an actual corpse party for the occasion, which I still think was some supreme hoofbeast manure whereas there was no corpse to be partied, but am too fucking polite to say. Do continue, please.”

A fingers jabs its way through his ribs and Karkat can’t tell whether Dave sounds less or more distressed than before as he continues spilling his guts all over the both of them. “Shut up, man. You, uh, remember the girl who was with you when Rose and I got our implants at the Handmaid’s? The weird one with the ram horns that kept spouting a bunch of unsettling jargon? Wait, no, now that I think about it she sounds just like the Handmaid, but tinier.”

Karkat resists the urge to press the heel of his palm into his forehead and _grind_. Instead he tries to say with minimal griping, “yeah, that’s Aradia. What did she do?”

“She just— she said Rose and I were a nearly unbeatable combination as a Seer of Light and Knight of Time. Tactically speaking, at least. Never known much ‘bout tactics myself, that’s Rose’s thing.”

Well, shit.

“And now Rose’s gone on a secret mission all by herself,” Karkat completes for him because he’s not a heartless moron. “Without you to rewind her sorry rear out of trouble in case her fancy Seer shtick fails to tell her a carapacian’s gonna stab her in the neck and hack her circuits.”

Dave’s arms tighten around his chest almost painfully, which is just dandy and not at all a sign of Karkat being, after all, a heartless moron down to the marrow. He should say something, anything to get Dave to stop feeling like his own sister’s left him behind to do an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle all on her broody and self-sacrificial-yet-self-serving-because-fuck-light-aspects lonesome, but that’s the moment every single unwelcome guest in their home decides to make a beeline for the living room in a show of unbridled, infuriating decency.

No one comments on the state of the two hosts, the humans most likely out of consideration for Dave and Kanaya because, Jegus, she looks even worse for wear than all of them put together, but Terezi manages a wink in his direction and Karkat tiredly flips her off. He’s confident she can smell it from that far if he puts enough disdain in it.

The last to enter the room is Calliope, trailing behind Roxy with a soft whirring of junctures, and a part of Karkat relaxes by just looking at her: their ace in the hole, the hope they would have never dreamt of having before that scavenging hunt deep into uncharted carapacian territory.

“Now, listen up, y’all grubs,” Terezi’s saying, with the most ridiculous mixture of Alternian accent and low Strider drawl Karkat chalks up to her nervousness in a fit of mercy, while she jabs at some keys on her husktop; suddenly there’s what looks to be a holographic map fizzling into existence right above the coffee table. Someone whistles.

“This baby here is our hopefully two-way ticket to the Furthest Ring, courtesy of Lalonde Senior’s latest heroic escapade up Jack Noir’s nook.” Someone gags. “Yeah, same, anyway. We’re pretty sure this is where Lalonde Junior’s gone off too, somehow thinking she could take on Lord English by herself. Yes, I know, _Light aspects_.”

She takes a deliberate, triumphant (about what, exactly, Karkat doesn’t want to know) pause after that, then slams her cane right on the floor, making a few people jump and Calliope blink a fraction faster. “We, my friends and pitied ones, are the cavalry.”

Karkat gives her one single clap of his prongs which she seems to appreciate the right amount, that is to say just shy of casual indifference. There’s not much that could ever derail Terezi’s concentration once she’s planning something.

“The team will be comprised of every individual present, save for whoever wishes to sit this one out, and not a single soul more. I don’t have a fancy implant but my—”

“Wait,” says John, who’s gone as far as raising his hand, “Vriska’s not coming with us?”

_That_ does manage to break Terezi’s concentration just fine, as John Egbert and any related matters are wont to. She turns to him with a face that screams disgusting pitch fondness as well as genuine consternation, then takes a deep breath and taps her cane again, lighter this time. “Vriska’s graciously agreed to stay out of this for the good of the mission, my dearest kismesis, because we might have a Void with us but we’re _not_ risking any unwanted attention neck-deep into whatever’s lurking out there.”

No one mentions the detail of all the attention Rose would attract in there like some kind of bright orange lighthouse, but Dave’s fingers dig a little deeper into Karkat’s back and Kanaya seems a little paler than before. John looks like he’s swallowed a rock or two.

“Alright,” Karkat says, and it might be the first word he’s uttered to someone who’s not his boyfriend since the phone call with Jade, “let’s wrap this shit up quickly. I’ve got plans for this weekend and they don’t involve you sorry bunch.”

 

**Terezi: Explain how awesome you are.**

If pressed, or if feeling especially generous, Terezi might admit that her team might not be doing a lousy job of keeping her safe from most carapacians that cross their path, giving her the chance to better focus on tailing Rose Lalonde. Standing by the outer edge of the Furthest Ring had been kind of unpleasant, the musty smell of ruins and a nothingness far less friendly than the one the other Lalonde exudes scraping her senses like a lion’s fangs, but at least the general desolation meant that the trail left behind by Rose was _shining_.

The blade of her cane runs through black, rusty metal with a satisfying crunch as Terezi disposes of what she believes to be the last dersite model from the small group that’s just jumped them from the shadows; around her, people start checking on each other’s eventual injuries (she’s pretty sure Dave must have done some minor rewinding earlier, she might grill him for deets later when Karkat forces them to take a break and starts shoving granola bars down everyone’s throats like the loving cluckbeast he is) which should give her enough time to find Rose’s fancy purple glow again and pick it up from where she’s last left off.

Or so she thought, but it seems like someone’s got other plans.

“Hello there, Peppermint!” she greets before even turning, grating smile already in place. Behind her, Jade kicks around some dismembered circuits as the sickly bright green and the smell of fresh snow that seem to cling to her skin worse than smoke to clothes waft their way to Terezi’s nose with every step forward Jade takes.

“I wasn’t expecting your company,” Terezi continues, finally turning around to face her and fighting the old instinct to squint as the Lord English green grows more intense. Sometimes she wonders what would this otherwise pretty regular girl feel like had she been brought back from hack-land by Calliope and not Roxy’s improvised handiwork, but then again she’d be weaker without the residues and weaker isn’t something you want to be in a hostile world, not even if you’re the Witch of Space. “Managed to unglue yourself from Kanaya’s side for a little while?”

Jade’s voice sounds very much like Terezi’s just made a social blunder when she says, “Jake’s keeping an eye on her for the time being, I’ve given him enough frog trivia to last him about ten minutes before things start getting awkward.”

“So I’m guessing our little chat will be over by then?”

“Well, either that or Jake’s in for some uncomfortable silence, which wouldn’t be very nice.” She sounds like, despite that, she’s fully prepared to throw him to the howlbeasts if necessary, so Terezi tries to fully prepare herself for some choice questions. Maybe they’re even going to play lightning round or whatever that thing Dave hates is called.

“I’ve been to Skaia lately,” Jade starts, suddenly sounding smaller. Skaia does that to people, Terezi knows it firsthand. “With Kanaya. We were only there to do maintenance, or, like, she was there to do maintenance and I was there to assist her with that but primarily to enlarge a bunch of wheat stalks because the rice on LOMAX isn’t looking good this year and you know how people get when food supplies are concerned—”

“Ten minutes, Peppermint, think of your cousomething.”

“It’s _cousin_ and I know you know that. Anyway, Skaia’s not… doing so hot, either. And I can only fix the shortage as long as there’s something to make bigger to begin with.”

Terezi’s heard the rumors, of course, but a small part of her has been chalking them up to general paranoia until now. She swallows around the lump in her throat, hoping no one will notice.

“Of course we could ask Roxy to pop some food out of thin air,” Jade continues, “but even that doesn’t sound all that sustainable on a large scale. Sorry, I guess I just— I need to make sure this goes smoothly.”

That’s when it clicks for Terezi, every piece neatly in its place, and her smile widens. “You wanna know how I’m doing this, how I’m tracking Rose. Or if I’m tracking her at all and this isn’t just a very literal case of blind leading the blind.”

Jade grimaces but she doesn’t step back, nor does she deny anything. Gutsy, just like her other cousin who isn’t really her cousin if Terezi recalls John’s incomprehensible explanation of his family tree. She _might_ have been a bit too distracted by how cute he looked when she pretended to get something wrong, even though getting some healthy caliginous fun after the Gamzee mess is hardly a crime if she’s to be honest.

“I’m a Seer of Mind, Peppermint,” she says after a few moments of what Jade must have felt as tense silence, “and Rose is a Seer of Light. My guess, and I’m rarely wrong, is that she’s been navigating this place by picking the shiniest, prettiest golden road her eyes show her, straight to Lord English’s hide, so that’s what I’m tracking.”

“You’re… following the golden road?”

“Hell no, who do you think I am, Troll Dorothy?” That gets a throaty chuckle out of Jade. “I’m following Rose’s _decisions_. I can See them, like they’re all linked together in this purple thread that she’s leaving behind, which she is, by the way. Pretty cool, right?”

It’s quiet after that, and Terezi takes the opportunity to get a firmer grip on the thread as she gets ready to give chase again. Then, Jade bumps her shoulder with her own.

“Thank you for indulging me, o mighty Seer. You’re a cool sister-in-law.”

As she walks back towards Kanaya and Jake Terezi’s left wondering, for the first time in a while, what does that mean. She thinks it sounds pretty dope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the record, i tend to read davekat as mostly flushed but i do feel like karkat would like to refer to dave as his boyfriend instead of matesprit because it allows him some distance from the societal pressure of quadrants.  
> also, i really wanted to fit a (roxy voice) if rose is ariadne in the labyrinth then would that make dirk pasiphae? bad furry joke in this chapter but the overall tone came out too serious so ill just unload it on y'all here. you're welcome.  
> hope u guys are liking this story, see ya next update!


	3. and although i was burning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do u have any idea of how hard it is to write jake english when ur not a native speaker and u have no idea of what in all fuck hes saying like 90% of the time

**Jake: Recall the day you brought Hope home with you.**

Dirk’s walking ahead of him, shoulders doing that hunched thing they do when he’s on edge, and his deep pink uniform is one of the few splotches of colour among the desolation of the Furthest Ring. Jake’s been meaning to talk to him, to say anything at all, even just offer some needed comfort about his little sister and the whole blasted situation they’re in, but the chances of him not not making a mighty mess of it seem awful bleak at present. He’s always been better with gestures than words, maybe the consequence of growing up isolated through most of his childhood and early teens, but walking up to the guy who broke up with him to offer him a hug sounds like one of the many things Roxy’s kindly advised him against.

“You look distraught,” comes a voice from his left, which makes Jake nearly jump out of his skin in surprise. He likes to pretend he managed to hide that pretty well, though, so he schools his face in the closest thing to a dashing expression he can put together on the spot and turns to face Calliope, who’s currently looking up at him with candid concern. It’s always startling to see how easily she mimics human emotions, how solid her grasp on them is despite her piqued insistence on the contrary.

“Do I now?” he stalls; he loves Calliope, truly and utterly so, but he’d rather not discuss his pathetic heart woes with her if possible. Her solutions tend to be a tad too drastic most times. “Must be this place rubbing off on me! Cripes, I’ve never been somewhere gloomier and I’ve swung by the Handmaid’s office after one of her hangovers. ‘Twas a real doozy, that one.”

“I think you’re trying to derail my attention.” Ah, she’s frowning now, he’s done it. Went and disappointed the miracle AI who’s going to save them all. “But I don’t mean to be insensitive, so I won’t press you if you don’t want to talk about it.” The underlying whirring of her voice gets louder for a moment as she says _insensitive_ the way it does whenever she’s especially pleased with herself or one of her drawings and Jake’s chest swells to the point he thinks it might hurt.

Looking at her now, all shiny and polished and chatting up a storm with everyone she meets, it’s jarring to remember the day when he first saw her. It had been only him and Roxy on a scavenging mission, a quick outing to get some scrap metal and anything still serviceable enough they could find, and the absence of Dirk’s voice in his earpiece after their breakup had been worse than any awful sound the dead zone had to offer. Then, he had tripped right over Calliope’s feet.

What he remembers the most is Roxy’s grin as she crouched down next to him to get a proper laugh at his antics (and to check on him, of course), then Roxy’s slack jaw as she turned to look at what he had taken a tumble for: a green, dusty dormant android, half-covered in a heap of wires and debris. Bringing it back had been an act of spite, a trophy to hand over to Skaianet, strip of every still salvageable circuit and send to the forge to melt afterwards like they did with carapacians because neither Roxy nor Sollux could be assed to reprogram them into a semi-safe state, but one good look at the thing had turned the whole plan upside down. One moment Roxy was mumbling technical jargon at Dirk as they were both hunched over his main laptop, colorful cables linking it to the freshly cleaned android, and the next Dirk was spinning Roxy around the room like she was weightless, muttering a jumbled up string of holy shits and fucking unbelievables while she shrieked with laughter.

Jake had been pretty lost through the whole scene, but in retrospect it’s still one of his fondest memories. It’s no common occurrence to witness two of your best friends discover the cure to the world.

“Jake?” Calliope’s asking him now, and she sounds uncertain in the particular way he thinks she must have taken from him, unfortunately. “What do you think will be my purpose once this is all over?”

He thinks about it. It’s a hard question, coming from an AI even more so, and it’s something he’s been trying to answer for himself as well with abysmal results, but he owes it to her, no matter how unconvicing and hollow it may sound to his own ears.  

“You don’t need one,” he says, to the both of them. “You’ll be free to do whatever in the world you want and it won’t be anybody’s business, for shame.” He thinks of his Grandma, of the day he got his implant so that he could live up to her, and he thinks of how gentle green, cold hands can be. “I’ve heard gardening is nice.”

Next to him, Calliope nods.

  


**Kanaya: Make a mess of it all.**

Her chainsaw cuts through metallic husks and circuits as if it’s all made of butter, the soft alien moobeast kind that’s so hard to come by, and Kanaya lets herself sink in the heat of it, up to the tip of her horns. Around her the world slows, comes into focus as her senses sharpen, and it’s a damned good thing the beings she’s fighting have no blood in them, or she’d be going for their necks by now, Porrim’s lessons about rainbow drinking manners effectively defenestrated out of her thinkpan to be retrieved later in a rush of shame. Instead, she swings at everything in her line of sight that isn’t wearing a Skaianet uniform and ignores the burning in her arms that grows with every time she holds her chainsaw up.

She doesn’t need to worry about protecting her neck, because she’s not a walking liability with a stupid implant ready to be infected and overridden until her nervous system is reduced to infested putty with no more free will than any of the carapacians she’s tearing down. Rose on the other hand— Rose has an implant and a thinkpan too full of lofty dreams and bullheaded confidence that always makes her bite more than her human blunt teeth could ever hope to chew and she’s completely, utterly _alone_ in a place designed to gobble her up without even taking the time to spit out the bones, all with her enhanced aspect making her the most visible thing for hundreds of miles to any piece of semi-sentient technology around that’s out for her blood.

There’s hot pain in her left calf and she almost stumbles as she pivots to cut the head of the carapacian that just got a swipe at her clean off its body and to shift her weight to her right. Next to her the older Strider whistles in what Kanaya might tentatively label as mild appreciation laced with irony after years of practicing her Strider speech, and that’s when it dawns upon her that the strife is over.

She takes one deep breath, then two, trying to get her thoughts back on track from where they’ve derailed and sunk into a swamp of worst case scenarios involving her dubiously alive matesprit. A third breath. She appears to be standing ankle-deep into dismembered carapacians; the gash in her calf feels like it’s pulsating.

Then a grey, warm hand clasps her shoulder with familiar ease not everyone would be willing to display around an adult jadeblood armed and standing in the wreckage they’ve created.

“That sure was a fucking display you just put on,” Karkat says, “Like, you sure did that, went and twirled your way through this ungodly mess like a crazed ballerina with her shame globes on fucking fire and her sponge in a worse state than my shitty ex-moirail’s after his sixth faygo-plus-pie trip to the dark carnival.”

“I’m your moirail now,” is all she manages to say to that, what with a good half of her concentration working on not sounding as morose as she’s feeling.

It’s not like she’s trying to be insensitive, or playing dumb: she knows Karkat’s been watching over Dave all this time, never once straying from his side like some kind of self-appointed bodyguard-slash-cholerbear.

She’s figured it out long ago, how humans might point at the flushed quadrant and say that’s the only one they get, only to demand diamonds in the same breath. The first time Rose had fished for pale affection, one night after a particularly bad nightmare about her late lusus and an alarming amount of talking meowbeasts, Kanaya had given it to her without thinking, panicked to the bone, only to run up to Karkat the day after, convinced the only solution was to kneel down and fess up as the pale-cheater she was. But Karkat had only huffed that gruff half-laughter of his and then proceeded to talk Kanaya through all the appalling discoveries he had made about how “thinkpan-rotting this sorry excuse of a species can be when there’s quadrants involved,” while showing her meaningful excerpts from various, awful human movies to prove his point. That day they had agreed to adapt to their respective partners’ needs, while at the same time staying moirails, but right now all Kanaya can think about is how she needs Karkat’s comfort just as much as Dave does. Matesprit or sister, Rose has left equally gaping holes in the both of them.

“That’s why I’m here, telling you to _calm down_ ,” says Karkat, who seems to be having far less trouble than her keeping up with their conversation. His hand slides up from where it’s resting on her shoulder to her face, filed claws grazing her skin before he flattens his palm against her cheek and purrs, low and guttural. One more reason to be embarrassed later: she’s being shoosh-papped in public and she can’t bring herself to protest. She prays to Jegus or whatever new fun typo her friends might be into at the moment that Terezi’s not sniffing in her direction.  

After a while, Karkat asks, “feeling better? I think Jane’s itching to fix your leg and I can’t fault her there.”

There is indeed one Jane Crocker hovering awkwardly behind him, so Kanaya forces the turmoil inside of her back down. It comes easier than expected with Karkat still smiling up at her.

Jane’s touch is pleasant and cold.

  


**Jane: OBEY.**

It’s a weird feeling, having her brain filled with static. It’s green and yellow and flashing bright in a way that makes it hard to focus on anything but the crackling voice in her head, telling her to destroy something. Everything, even, there’s no reason to be modest, crackling head voices don’t _do_ modest, so why should she?

She curls her fingers tighter on the handle of her trident and the static grows louder, brighter, like it’s spreading from the burning at the base of her nape all the way up to every little nerve and then down through her whole body. The world seems kind of blotted out in a way that makes it hard for her to concentrate on anything outside of the blinding green and the orders, but she thinks there’s someone screaming out loudly enough for her to notice.

“... ne!”

With a brusque flick of her wrist she swings her trident towards the source of the noise and every fiber of her body _buzzes_ with accomplishment as the vibration traveling down the handle tells her she’s hit her target.

“... ane!”

The noise sounds different now, more like a plea, and it should be so, so disturbing and wrong but the static is just too much to care about anything else right now, so she ignores whatever foolish part of her silly, human thinkpan might be telling her to stop and raises her arm high above her head, taking a step forward. She arches her back, gets ready to strike down—

And then she wakes up.

It all starts coming back to her in bits and pieces: the stiffness from sleeping outside on a bedroll, the panicked thumps of her own heartbeat in her ears, their mission, the present. Jane (she’s still Jane Crocker, certified Maid of Life, born on April thirteenth and in complete control of her own self at the moment) takes a deep, even breath, waiting for the residual anxiety from the nightmare to dissipate. Jade’s face is only inches away from her own, mouth slightly ajar and warm breath tickling Jane’s skin with every exhale, a hint of drool pooling by the side of her dark lips. Judging by her face, at least one out of the two of them must be having peaceful, static-free dreams, which Jane knows to not be much of a common occurrence for Jade.

Sometimes, when the flashbacks bowl her over like the high tide to the point she’d rip the implant from her neck if she could afford it, she’s left wondering just how alienating it must feel for Jade, who still carries the debris of the virus inside of her, defanged but never truly erased, always there to set her apart and away. She wonders if Jade’s ever afraid of losing control again.

Staring at her sleeping face won’t do much except make Jane feel worse about her own lack of rest, though, so she reluctantly crawls out of her bedroll and stands up with a groan, flexing her legs and stretching out her arms to get at least some of the sore feeling out of her joints. In the eerie silence of the Furthest Ring someone clears their throat in a way that sends a very different type of dread down her spine.

“Rough night?” Roxy’s unmistakable voice asks from somewhere in the solid darkness in front of her and Jane has to rub at her still heavy eyes and squint to make Roxy’s blurry silhouette out of the black background. She fishes her glasses up from the pouch on her belt and puts them on with a sigh. No escaping this now.

“Yeah,” she says, grimaces about how groggy her voice still sounds. The silhouette shifts in a way that suggests Roxy might be moving towards her, which might be what Jane craves and fears the most at the same time. “Terezi says we’re getting closer, so… You know, the signal and all that stuff, it’s…”

“It’s?” comes Roxy’s probing, too gentle not to sting on her skin, and Jane realizes she’s trailed off. She doesn’t want to have this conversation, not with this particular person and definitely not in the middle of nowhere, with who knows what lurking outside the void bubble blanketing them (when does Roxy even _sleep_?), but it’s been clawing at her throat for so long it feels like the first breath after apnoea when she allows herself to say, “it’s getting stronger. I have no idea of how’s Jade not thrashing about in her sleep as we speak but I’ll be damned if I complain.”

She inhales as deeply as she can force herself to, then deflates. Roxy’s standing right in front of her. “So yeah, rough night. Are you planning on getting some rest like a responsible professional or are you set on overworking yourself like the concept of guard shifts has been long forgotten and left to rot in the wake of humanity’s decay?”

Roxy blinks, or at least it looks like she might have blinked. “Wow, hangin’ out with the Stri-boys much? That was amazing in-character work, Janey, you’ve got a knack for th—”

“ _Rolal_.”

“Shit, alright, Dave’s gonna switch with me in, uh, half an hour?” Roxy concedes, holding her hands up in a placating gesture. “Kid wakes up by himself and all because time shenanigans, so there’s no chance of me doing the stupid thing and not waking him up to tough it out all by myself. That enough for you, Doc?”

There’s no way in the Medium Jane’s letting Dave take the watch given how she’s got no intention whatsoever of going back to sleep for the night and expose herself to more disturbing flashbacks of her running her trident clean through her pleading girlfriend’s chest, but she only nods; concentrating on the murky details of Roxy’s face is a pretty effective method to get back under control the crunching sound of metal breaking Roxy’s sternum, or the spattered blood Jane had found dried up on her weapon after Calliope’s antivirus had finished working its magic.

“Was death…” she starts, then coughs pretty pathetically when her throat reminds her of how parched she’s feeling all of sudden. “Was it horrible?”

Roxy, to her credit, doesn’t seem to skip a beat at that. “Feferi dragging my ass back in the land of the living did feel kinda yucky, NGL, like I was being pulled out of slimy goop and it all kept clinging to me sticky and gross, but dying itself? Didn’t even feel that.” Her left hand is hovering near Jane’s cheek, and she’s worrying her lower lip the way she does when she’s uncertain about what to do. It’s too much to resist, after so many years of forced distance because how could Jane ever even _look_ at her again after that?

“You cutting me out hurt much worse,” Roxy mumbles, and Jane gives in. Leaning into her touch she can feel the cuts, the callouses she still remembers, hard and scraping and familiar, the rapid pulse of the heart she pierced into stillness with her own hands. She kisses there, where Roxy’s wrist turns into the heel of her palm, and grabs her waist to pull her closer, green static drowned out by the deafening, quiet noise Roxy makes.

Hazily, Jane thinks there’s a reason why it’s so easy to get swallowed up by the void.  


	4. you're the only light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for brief suicide ideation in dirk's pov

**Dirk: Survey the damage you’ve caused.**

The thing is, there is a pretty solid chance he has kind of messed up there in their latest round of strife against evil robots. Things have kind of gone completely pear-shaped on his end, as they tend to, people have been upset, as they also tend to when Dirk’s involved, _alea iacta est_. Or, well, he supposes likening himself to Julius Caesar might not be the most pristine act of intellectual honesty (never his forte, that one) considering the only Rubicon Dirk crossed was the one that led not to the foundation of an empire but instead straight to stupidity and subpar battle strategies, resulting in the protective patch of metal on his nape getting ripped off of him, leaving him as vulnerable as a newborn foal to that sweet hacking in the chaos of the battle. He should probably thank John for blasting the prospit model that was about to jab its grubby fingers up his spine, if Jake ever lets him get up again, that is.

“Will you _hold still_ already, Strider?” he’s asking, even though it’s his own hands that keep shaking like a seismometer like its magnitude 8 out there and Dirk’s been sitting still as a statue ever since Jake’s dragged him away by the wrist, pointedly looking right ahead and not back at him. “I’m trying to fasten this…” A pause, more clumsy tugging at Dirk’s neck. “Thing! Booyeah, all done.”

“Ah,” Dirk says, carefully monotone, “praise Thee, o God.”

Tightened around his skin there’s what probably looks like a makeshift, bright yellow bandage, fraying at the edges where Jake’s ripped the fabric from his shirt in a hurry and with a somewhat touching disregard for the medical supplies they’ve brought with them on the mission. It makes Dirk feel fuzzy inside in a dangerous, hungry way he used to think he wouldn’t ever feel again about Jake English, but also like a ridiculous douche wrapped in a flashy ribbon performing the worst Christmas present ever without even a crappy pine tree nearby to curl under.

“Drat, I might have done less of a bang up job than previously thought,” Jake muses, the tips of his fingers still pressed warm against Dirk’s neck, just above the slope of his shoulders. He’s making it hard to concentrate on anything else, but, all things considered, that might be a good thing, what with the rest of their group camping out around the corner and making so little noise it’s impossible to think they might be doing anything but eavesdropping on whatever’s going on at present. Between him and Jake. There sure is something going on.

Dirk clears his throat, but before he can say anything he’s sure to regret later for approximately the next few months (until he does something worth of even _more_ regret), such as maybe asking Jake what the hell he thinks he’s doing to their precarious relationship and to Dirk’s nerves for example, Jake’s hands move to his collarbones, splayed and heavy and firm as they pull him flush against Jake’s chest. Jake’s mouth is almost pressed to Dirk’s ear when he says, “sorry, gosh, I’m sorry, I just— is this okay? Are _you_ okay, Dirk?”

There’s an array of answers for those specific questions: they range from a good ole “fuck no” to fashionable, suave, less than white lies to an elaborate as well as verbose tirade on how none of this fits the bill of Acceptable Behaviours Between Exes with still some space left for an MLA-cited essay titled My Serotonin’ss Escaping From Above. Any of the options listed above would be significantly more responsible than what Dirk decides to do next, yet he does it anyway, because forget souls, he’s Prince of not following his own advice.

He leans into Jake’s body, dips his head sideways, careful not to mess with the bandage, and murmurs, “can we have this conversation after it’s all over?” quietly, words muffled by the fabric of Jake’s jacket collar. It smells so much like him it stirs something ugly in the cold pit of Dirk’s stomach. Good but also bad but also good.

Jake readjusts his grip around him so that his lips are grazing Dirk’s hairline and the _something_ writhes and rears. It makes him want to either run his sword through it and off himself on the spot (two birds, one stone, that’s some quality problem solving right there) or to grab Jake by the front of his shirt and pull until they topple backwards. He can’t do any of that, so he opts for closing his eyes as he focuses on the warmth seeping under his skin, ignoring the needling in the back of his brain where all his fears fester.

“We’re sorting the shit out of this as soon as we fix this buffoonery, lickety-split,” Jake says, resolute, and for the first time in a too-long stretch of time, deep into the bowels of the Furthest Ring and one step away from Lord English, Dirk laughs.  

 

**Dave: Rewind.**

Karkat standing by his side is the only source of warmth this far into the proverbial lion’s den, the air around them heavy like it’s been frozen, and Dave half-expects the ground to crunch under his feet with the sound of fresh snow at this point. They’re hiding behind something Dave’s sure he doesn’t want to investigate any further for fear of finding tentacles on it and Terezi’s just told them Rose’s track runs cold barely a few steps ahead with the same inflection she would use to monologue about every single, enticing reason why one of her scalemates needs to die for its plushie crimes, or to discuss the weather. She’s not exactly one for nuances, although Dave suspects she might be simply too hooked on her own theatrics as a result of her FLARPing days.

“Okay, we’re heading out,” Terezi whispers, which is kind of comforting because maybe she believes Rose’s still able to hear them but also kind of a bummer because why would they ever need to hide from _Rose_. “Remember: we deal with whatever’s out there and we keep Calliope out of the fray no matter what. Freaking out’s for later.” Then she steps outside of their hiding place and, no matter how heavy his legs feel all of sudden, Dave can’t but follow.

The first thing he notices is the sheer amount of carapacians; most are dismembered and lifeless, puppets with their strings cut, but he can make out the telltale shining of some of them in the dark, edging closer now that they’ve spotted them. Then he sees the tower, the damned _transmitter_ , hulking and ridiculous and beeping an ominous green where a figure stands tall in front of it. From the back it looks similar enough to Calliope, only some sizes bigger and also probably eviler.

Dave’s grown up in the only quote safe unquote corner of the world four centuries after a fish alien with delusions of grandeur decided to cook up a master plan to achieve complete domination (and get murdered by her own creation before she could get a hold of her safety net, hah, how’s that _hybris_ feel, Condy?), Dave’s got circuitry in his spine because the fight for survival needed an enhanced Knight of Time, Dave lives with the phantom feeling of a shitty sword lifting his chin up without a care if it breaks skin because _training’s not over yet_. Dave should by all means get to feel some semblance of emotion upon seeing Lord English in the metaphorical flesh, but he can’t quite manage.

Instead he stands very still as his eyes find the ones of his sister, lifeless and glassy and is that caked blood on her uniform—

“Freakouts later!” Terezi yells at him, cane already unsheathed, at the same time as Rose’s hands start glowing. Her face doesn’t shift by one inch as she makes beams of light rain down on them and, for the first time in a long time, Dave feels unequipped for a fight.

His instincts still kick in though, a bitter reminder he guesses, so he lets himself focus on the mission and not on the fact that Rose wouldn’t even recognize him right now if he walked up to her and rapped her favourite sonnets in front of her. He slashes through carapacians, allowing himself one selfish decision and concentrating his efforts more on the Keep Callie Safe side and less on the Try To Knock Rose Out Without Killing Her side. That’s a mission best left to people who don’t happen to be her twin brother, or so Dave thinks until he looks up from the derse model he’s impaled just in time to see Rose lunge at Karkat with her needles in her hands.

Karkat makes an aborted motion with his dominant arm, something in between shielding himself and raising his sickle against her, but Rose is an implanted Seer and she’s faster and her knee bends ever so gracefully as she ducks and swings, burying one of the needles into Karkat’s belly with clinical precision. Someone, either Karkat or Dave himself, he doesn’t know nor will know later, makes a choked, wet sound, but before he can even begin to _think_ something grips his hands hard enough to hurt. Terezi’s claws are digging into his skin as she says, voice level and blank as a white page, “we’ve got this.”

And the world goes still for a second.

Usually, when Dave rewinds he lets his intuition do the heavy lifting for him; when Rose’s with him he lets her golden light show him where things’ve gone wrong, nudge him in the right direction with certainty. Now, all he sees around him is glowing, sprawling teal. It grows in too many directions for him to keep track, each branch a different timeline where something went differently, and none of them are the _right_ one. In one timeline, Dave shoves Karkat out of the way and the needle pierces through the narrow space in between his ribs and into the softness of his lung, leaving him to a nasty death suffocated by his own blood. In another, Dave is less careful with the carapacians and gets pinned to the ground, hacked before the others can do anything about it. There’s one where they all die, Rose with them, but Terezi’s claws are back digging into him and Dave grits his teeth against the nausea.

“Stay with me,” she’s telling him, and her voice is the only sound in an ocean of different worlds. “Dave, stay with me. Don’t let it overwhelm you.”

He swallows hard. “Some maddening shit you’ve got here, TZ. You live like this?”

Her undignified snort seems a good sign, or at least a sign that one of them has their shit on lockdown, maybe, and Dave lets her tug him backwards, their steps tracing the teal light. “Of course not, you insufferable wiggler. This,” and she gestures aimlessly around, “is your handiwork as well as mine, Time Boy. Now shut up and let me concentrate.”

For once, he makes an actual effort not to run his mouth any further, not one of the half-assed attempts he pretends to entertain when told to can it by pretty much anybody else barring his boyfriend, and Terezi rewards him with a cheshire smile. Then she points at the main end of the branch they’re standing on and makes a satisfied clicking noise in the back of her throat, like a cricket ready to throw down. It’s a timeline where Karkat’s sticking to Calliope’s side and Rose is surrounded by Dirk, Kanaya and John.

“Where making this happen,” Terezi says. Dave can’t but agree.

  


**Calliope: Meet your brother.**

For the first time in forever (well, a figurative forever at least!) Calliope’s glad she’s an AI. With everything that’s going on all at once relying on her strictly objective and, if she’s to be honest, kind of faster processors instead of brains-slash-sponges is really the only way she could ever hope to keep up in an efficient fashion.

One: Rose’s body is limp on the ground, which is less alarming than the situation itself suggests, since she’s been neutralized with utmost care not to hurt her beyond repair. There’s a dreadful gash on her neck that’s gone untreated for too long and the angry red folds of where her skin breaks have started to look darker, dotted with the pale yellow of pus. Kanaya’s already working on cleaning the wound though, and her hands are steady but her eyes are wild and Jane’s staying out of her way despite being the more qualified medic in what Calliope thinks could be respect and also fear. Trolls rank higher than humans on the _apex predator_ ladder, although according to intriguing sci-fi productions from both civilizations they don’t outrank artificial intelligences. Calliope’s always found that puzzling.

Two: all the nearby carapacians have been disposed of, but the probabilities of more of them converging on their group increase by the second this close to the core of it all and with how battered most of her team is looking she doubts they’d get away safely from another strife of similar proportion. The sooner Jade teleports them away, the better.

Three: several people are urging her to go do what she’s been programmed for with several degrees of panic present in their voices and body languages.

Number three seems like the most pressing input, especially since it would fix number two (and maybe make number one marginally better, Kanaya’s care aside, of course) pretty much instantly, so Calliope walks. The android in front of her is taller, wider, covered by a thick layer of dust that’s centuries old. Cables of all sorts of different colours run from its ports to the tower but otherwise it appears to be dormant, a drained husk that exists only in the form of a widespread malfunction gotten out of hand by now, the same way Calliope used to exist only as a discarded cocoon with the key to fix things etched deep inside her before being given life again, Pinocchio or real child in the hands of her personal blue fairies.

She feels the metal of her twin model for the subtle dip of a panel and then she digs carefully, wrenching the lid open and exposing the almost pulsating mess of Caliborn-06’s controls. There are ten holes in between the circuits, divided in two groups of five each, and Calliope dips her fingers in there, suppressing a shudder when it all connects. Immediately she’s met with bright static, the feeling now familiar after cleaning up a few hacked people on duty. It’s also unfamiliar in the way meeting someone you’ve already heard a lot of for the first time would feel, or so she imagines given her limited database when it comes to social situations and only slightly less limited personal experience. Truth be told, Calliope used to think this would be scary once, but now she just thinks.

She thinks of the Condesce, dark grey face with bright pink details her very first memory as she smiled down like a child handed a prize, and she thinks of the day the plan had been put into action. Everything before coming back to life inside of Dirk’s little apartment feels corrupted, hard to decipher and garbled beyond repair in some points where time has eaten at her memory disk, but Calliope still remembers the anguish, the all too genuine anguish of not being able to do anything but hide as the virus got out of control in ways it was never supposed to. She had run low on battery, high on fright, painfully aware of her newly orphaned status no matter how misplaced on a creature with no parents nor blood, and then, too tired to keep going, she had stopped.

Now, four hundred thirteen years later, Calliope-09 injects the antivirus she’s kept within her in the body of the thing she’s been built to loathe and oppose, so that the world may live on.

So that her friends may breathe easy, so that Rose may come back to them, so that they may start rebuilding. So that she may follow a friend’s advice and pick up gardening.

“Farewell, Brother,” she says, as the static finally stops.

  


**Rose: Rouse from your nap.**

First comes the dim, warm light, filtering past her eyelids as the sun lowers in the sky. Beneath her she can feel two things: the thick fabric of Kanaya’s tailored skirt and the shifting of the sand, meaning she must still be in the same spot that she was when she woke up from her previous nap, or the one before that. She groans.

“Oh,” comes Kanaya’s voice, a balm to Rose’s swiftly increasing frustration with herself, her body and the “very basic concept of recovery, Rose, I’m surprised you don’t get it”, as Jane has put it on more than one of their dreadful doctor-patient confrontations. “Are you awake?”

The temptation to nuzzle into Kanaya’s lap and ignore the question altogether, at least until her brain’s done slowly dragging itself out of the muddy puddle it seems to have sunken into while she was out, is a strong, compelling one, but Rose’s been using her wife’s legs as a pillow for what must be hours by now and, no matter how patient Kanaya may be (too much for her own good) or how self-absorbed Rose may feel (also too much for her own good), it’s time to give her blood circulation a deserved rest. Bright dots cloud Rose’s vision for a moment as she sits up, but she ignores them. They’re far more bearable than constant static anyway.

“How long was I out?” she asks, even though judging by the position of the sun it must have been no more than an hour. Good, maybe she hasn’t missed out much of what is supposed to be a joyous celebration thrown in honor of her alleged stupidity and heroics alike; she’s no life of the party but she’d hate to nap through her friends’ efforts to welcome her back in their new, healing world.

“Around twenty minutes, give or take,” Kanaya answers in a rare display of vagueness. Then, because she’s Kanaya and she knows Rose the way Rose knows every little mole and scar dotting both their bodies, she adds, “nothing major happened, or at least that’s what I’d tell you didn’t I believe Dirk’s fourteen minutes and forty seven seconds long rant on the especially delicate subject of latin diphthongs to be the epitome of fascinating. I have reason to believe multiple people might have recorded it for posterity, though, so we’re in luck.”

“I can’t believe you don’t know how long did I spend gracing your body with the burden of my sleepy head but the moment there’s a grammatical dissertation on a dead tongue you count it down to the seconds.”

“Dave counted it, then told me. And by me I mean everyone within earshot.”

That makes Rose laugh, muscles straining against all the little aches, physical and phantom. “He’s done us a valuable service, then. Was someone mistreating Dirk’s chumhandle again?”

“Jake,” Kanaya says with a pleased nod, “in what looked so painfully like clumsy flushed courting it would’ve given Karkat a fit hadn’t it given Dirk one first.” She stops, lips pursed the way they get when she’s pondering something with even more care than usual, then she smiles at Rose. The iridescent atmosphere of LOLAR is so kind to her it almost hurts. “I should thank you for keeping your wooing shenanigans to an acceptable minimum, or at least above wiggler level.”

Rose dips her head, spilling giggles all over the expanse of skin left uncovered by Kanaya’s top, pressing a kiss to her jaw. There’s a happy sigh, and the faint feeling of rain beginning to fall and the happy sounds of her friends nearby as they start gathering their stuff to move the party indoors.

“Thank you for bringing me back,” she whispers. Kanaya nearly makes them both fall back into the sand while someone hollers from the shore.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wheeew it's done!! over! all wrapped up! we've made it pals


End file.
